The political anger comes from people who can’t win an honest debate, and whose view of the world is demonstrably false. If they want to throw their intellectual weight around, the easy way is to attack their opponents in a very personal and nasty way (the hard way is to rethink their view of the world).

Arizona state representative Lopez was a high profile driving force behind the immediate effort on the Left to blame the Tea Party for the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords and the murder of 6 bystanders yesterday (with scores more injured). Without having a single piece of information, Lopez took to the airwaves condemning the Tea Party and conservatives for the murder spree.

Jared Lee Loughner, the would-be assassin, is a confirmed Leftist Democrat upset with Congresswoman Giffords for being a conservative Democrat who was not Leftist enough for his tastes.

The evidence is at Blackfive. At about 4:10 in the vid at the link, Ms. Lopez starts the guilt-by-association trip with the Tea Party supporters of Giffords’s opponent in the 2010 election.

UPDATE 2: Sad to say, media guilt-by-association is a nearly five-decade tradition (at least). In November 1963, until they learned that Communist Lee Harvey Oswald was the shooter of John F. Kennedy, network TV made a point of showing a few protestors holding “Yankee Go Home” signs along JFK’s Dallas motorcade route.

Even after Oswald’s arrest, some still obsess over the strong dislike for Kennedy that some in Dallas had — as if it matters, which it doesn’t. It doesn’t take a lot of searching to find someone in a supposedly responsible position who still hasn’t gotten over the fact that it wasn’t the far right that assassinated Kennedy. Note that the linked column doesn’t even mention Oswald.

On November 5, 2009, Maj. Nidal Hasan opened fire at a troop readiness center in Ft. Hood, Texas, killing 13 people. Within hours of the killings, the world knew that Hasan reportedly shouted “Allahu Akbar!” before he began shooting, visited websites associated with Islamist violence, wrote Internet postings justifying Muslim suicide bombings, considered U.S. forces his enemy, opposed American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as wars on Islam, and told a neighbor shortly before the shootings that he was going “to do good work for God.” There was ample evidence, in other words, that the Ft. Hood attack was an act of Islamist violence.

Nevertheless, public officials, journalists, and commentators were quick to caution that the public should not “jump to conclusions” about Hasan’s motive. CNN, in particular, became a forum for repeated warnings that the subject should be discussed with particular care.

“The important thing is for everyone not to jump to conclusions,” said retired Gen. Wesley Clark on CNN the night of the shootings.

… Fast forward a little more than a year, to January 8, 2011. In Tucson, Arizona, a 22 year-old man named Jared Lee Loughner opened fire at a political event, gravely wounding Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, killing a federal judge and five others, and wounding 18. In the hours after the attack, little was known about Loughner beyond some bizarre and largely incomprehensible YouTube postings that, if anything, suggested he was mentally ill. Yet the network that had shown such caution in discussing the Ft. Hood shootings openly discussed the possibility that Loughner was inspired to violence by…Sarah Palin. Although there is no evidence that Loughner was in any way influenced by Palin, CNN was filled with speculation about the former Alaska governor.

UPDATE 4:At NewsBusters — “ABC Interviews Friend of Giffords Shooter, Ignores Her Claim He’s Liberal.” The friend’s tweets saying just that are at the link.

Another former high school classmate said that Mr. Loughner may have met Representative Giffords, who was shot in the head outside the Safeway supermarket, several years ago.

“As I knew him he was left wing, quite liberal. & oddly obsessed with the 2012 prophecy,” the former classmate, Caitie Parker, wrote in a series of Twitter feeds Saturday. “I haven’t seen him since ’07 though. He became very reclusive.”

“He was a political radical & met Giffords once before in ’07, asked her a question & he told me she was ‘stupid & unintelligent,’ ” she wrote.

Instapundit’s Insta-snark: ““Quite liberal,” and didn’t like Giffords in 2007, before anyone had heard of Sarah Palin or the Tea Party. But it’s their fault.”

[...] of course, there’s the deliberately avoided recall of rhetoric from President Obama (here and here, for warm-ups) that could certainly be interpreted by unstable people as a call to violence, as [...]

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